"It feels good to get back," right wing Wayne Simmonds said. "When you go on a break for nine days, I think the last three days I was wishing to be back here even though I was in the sun. It's really nice to see all the guys again."

That's not to say the players that didn't go to Sochi, Russia, for the Olympics didn't enjoy themselves during the intermission of the NHL schedule.

"You kind of had to pinch yourself if you're golfing or in the sun or whatever," Scott Hartnell said, "that there's 20-something games left before playoffs and you have to keep that mindset and be focused a little bit."

A locker-room reunion was short before the Flyers' first practice since they beat the Calgary Flames 2-1 back on Feb. 8. For most players, that was the last time they laced up a pair of skates.

By the time they took them off again Wednesday, they may have been wishing to be back on the beach.

The practice, like most this season under coach Craig Berube, involved a lot of skating. Considering they don't play their next game until next Thursday, when the San Jose Sharks come to town, there's plenty of time to keep conditioning.

"We're gonna go over a lot of stuff with the practice time we've got and the guys we've got here," Berube said. "We'll get everybody back, we'll keep working on it, but the power play, everything, we have to go over everything. Practice it and get back to the level we were at."

When the NHL broke its season for the Olympics, the Flyers were the hottest team in the league, having won four in a row. What seems like a second training camp will be treated like a review by the coaching staff. The object is to get back to the fundamentals that were winning them games two weeks ago.

"I think there's no way to predict what's gonna happen," said Simmonds of how teams will react when the schedule resumes, "but every night's gonna be a dog fight and I think we've got to work toward obviously getting back to where we were before the break."

This is, after all, the most important part of the NHL schedule. It's a race in more ways than one.

"Team game has a lot to do with rhythm, how your team plays defensively, offensively and special teams," defenseman Braydon Coburn said. "When you have a layoff like that, the rhythm gets broken. It's up to each individual team to see who can get it back quick enough and maintain it for the stretch here."

For the Flyers, that means 23 games until the regular season ends. Then, they hope, the sprint can continue.

What's your wager?

So here it is, once again, the U.S. and Canada.

The Olympic teams will face off noon Friday and defenseman Hal Gill and forward Adam Hall are in the minority among Flyers rooting for the red, white and blue. In fact, save for a pair of Swedish defensemen in Erik Gustafsson and Nick Grossmann, everyone else who practiced Wednesday was Canadian.

No word on if Gill or Hall have tried placing any friendly bets with their teammates, but apparently Gill asked for a "Canada vs. everyone else" scrimmage in practice. It never happened.

"We've got too many Canadians here, I guess," Coburn said.

A grand return

After Wednesday's games, which eliminated Jake Voracek and the Czech Republic, the Flyers have only one Olympian still in Sochi in Finnish defenseman Kimmo Timonen.